Wednesday, 18 September 2013

The withheld smiley

The written word, as we all know, is a wonderful thing. As
it has done over the centuries, it constantly shapes and remoulds itself to
suit our contemporary needs. What fascinates me most of all about text
communication is the ingenious ways in which we bend it so that it includes the
very non-verbal information it’s supposed to lack.

Perhaps the most obvious and well-known way of doing this shorthand
today is through the use of smileys. Those cute little sideways faces are an
easy way of showing happiness, amusement, cheekiness and sarcasm, although
technically they’re not as such an employment of the written word (they’ve
elbowed their way in). Of course, smileys exist for negative emotions also; but
the thing with negative smileys is they’re not quite really, well, negative
enough. The very word, ‘smiley’, after all, hardly sits with any attempt to
express genuine anger or despair; whether it’s a sad-faced open bracket you’re
using or a thin-lipped lower-case l, negative smileys are still just too cute
and clever to be taken all that seriously. Using them to communicate genuine
states of displeasure is a bit like announcing you’ve been made redundant through
an arrangement of alphabet noodles. For all their valiant efforts, they’re
ultimately best suited to expressing the milder side of negativity, such as
inconvenience or a smattering of frustration.
“That book I ordered by Huckleberry Hax still hasn’t arrived
yet :(”. That sort of thing.

When it comes to real annoyance, real anger, real
miserableness, we turn to a different, far more subtle set of strategies. Whenever
we’re feeling really low, after all,
we lack the energy and emotional literacy to simply tell people what we’re
feeling – and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Instead of simply saying how we feel, we
offer up clues to our dearest and closest so that they might infer our
emotional state. In RL, these clues are relatively obvious and include: The
Silent Treatment, stomping about, applying significantly more pounds per square
inch than required when returning objects to a surface. And so on. In text,
it’s a lot harder. Smileys are still a notable part of our strategy, but
they’re now notable chiefly through their absence: when we’re really pissed off in text, we withhold
them. All of them. Deciphering the meaning of an absent smiley is a complex issue.
Here is my brief guide to this art form.

The Greeting Without
Smiley (GWS)

Withholding smileys can be a very powerful form of
expression, particularly in the initial IM greeting. There are two essential
forms of this action. The first – opening an IM exchange without a smiley – is
relatively moderate in its severity as a face slap. Starting a conversation,
then, with:

Someoneyouknow Resident: hi

is usually a communication that translates along the lines
of, “I’m feeling low and I’d appreciate it if you ask me how I am (I’ll
probably reply with, ‘I’m fine’, but rest assured any negativity you then
subsequently experience from me will be far less than if you hadn’t asked).”
Receiving such a message when you weren’t expecting it is often accompanied by
a feeling no more serious than “It looks like a significant percentage of my
carefree evening in the metaverse can be written off, then; I suppose I’d
better ask what’s wrong.”

The Reply Without
Smiley (RWS)

The second form of this strategy, however, is far more
biting. This is to wait for your close friend or partner to greet you with
their own smiley and then to reply without one:

You: hey there :)

Someoneyouknow Resident: hey

Depending on the closeness of the relationship you have with
your correspondent, this could mean anything from, “I denounce your generally
cheerful state as naïve, bourgeois ignorance of the pain I suffer; I doubt very
much you could have the merest hint of insight into it” to “You, buddy, are in
serious trouble”. The length of the pause between the greeting and the reply is
especially significant: too long, and the recipient might assume the sender to
have been AFK or in another conversation, their non-smileyness connected to an
entirely external issue; too short and the apparent eagerness to deliver the
absent smiley might be inferred by the recipient to mean that the sender was
strategically waiting for the greeting, their non-smiley reply prepared and
awaiting the fall of the enter key – it might just possibly be a bluff, a
pretence at anger to distract from a deeper issue:

You: hey there :) [thinks, “If I
start cheerful, she might feel less threatened by a conversation about why
we’ve not been spending time together recently”].

Someoneyouknow Resdient: hey
[thinks, “If I fake anger over him being on half an hour later than usual,
perhaps he won’t ask me difficult questions”].

The Reply Without Smiley is the wrong-footing technique of
the text conversation world; it leaves the smiling initiator suddenly knowing
they’ve completely misjudged the direction from which the correspondent is
coming and defenceless to make any sort of powerful return. To the Greeting Without
Smiley, of course, there is always the option to reply in kind, to answer the
sender’s grimace with your own: “I’ll see your pain and match it,” you can nonverbally
reply; the opening moves of a game I refer to as ‘Pissed Off Poker” (POP):

Someoneyouknow Resident: hi

You: hey

But to the RWS, any attempt to imply your own annoyance
following that initial smile – that gawping, inane, frankly idiotic grin – is
certain to be met with failure. A smiley smiley, once offered, cannot be taken
back.

Adding extra bite to
the withheld smiley

Veterans of POP will know that there are, of course, a
number of additional techniques to strengthen a RWS or own opening gambit.
Capital letters and full-stops (or ‘periods’, as I understand they’re called in
the US) are one such play. Restraint from the use of familiar forms of greeting
is another.

You: Hello.

is, therefore, a hard GWS that signifies trouble and only
trouble lies ahead for the recipient. On the other hand:

Someoneyouknow Resident: hi

You: Hello.

is the POP equivalent of “I’ll see your pain and raise you
my misery”. Finally:

Someoneyouknow Resident: hey there
:)

You: Hello.

is the ultimate in RWS replies – less of a slap across the
face and more of a punch to the nose – and to be used very sparingly.
Incidentally, those of you who insist on initial letter capitalisation and full
punctuation in every IM you write might like to rethink this approach: your
‘Hello.’ will be greatly diminished in its power as a result.

[Even more incidentally, whilst we’re on the subject of
literary pedantry, if you’re one of those people who just can’t lower yourself
to the pictorial arrangement of alphanumeric characters, “/me smiles” is not the grammatically correct equivalent
of “:)” – the fact you’ve gone to the effort of typing the extra four
characters makes it a non-spontaneous smile; thought through; calculated;
possibly insincere. Don’t like that? Go to the extra effort of writing “/me
smiles warmly” or “/me smiles in delight” then.]

Responding to the
withheld smiley

What options remain to the recipient of a RWS? It all
depends. There will be those times when your reaction to one of these is a genuine
‘huh?’ and a frantic searching of recent memories for clues of something you
should feel guilty about: profiles will be hurriedly examined for their rez
dates (if you can enter a “Happy Rez Day!!” within ten seconds of a RWS, you
might just pull it off as an unresearched comment; you can be fairly certain,
however, that you’ll be in a busy region in such moments and profiles will take
no fewer than 90 minutes to rez), IM logs will be rapidly scrutinised for
mention of RL issues you should have attended to better. If nothing is
discovered, one option is to take the ‘standby gambit’ and just await a further
response (depending on the circumstances, this will either reward you with an
eventual comment that strengthens your position – since it betrays your
partner’s desire to speak with you – or it will result in a silence until
logoff for which you will pay dearly at a later date – probably with your life).
Another is to overcommit to happy smileys in every subsequent comment as some
sort of stubborn, post-hoc rationalisation of cheerfulness, slapping them merrily
to the end of every sentence visible. For example:

You: hey there :)

Someoneyouknow Resident: Hello.

You: how are you? :)

effectively says, “I refuse to succumb to your attempts at
reducing my well-earned positivity”. It’s a bit like those Facebook
picture-quotes on happiness and love and not changing that you sometimes find
yourself wishing you could roll into a cone and use to stab the poster in the
eye.

But there will also be those times when you know full well
why you haven’t received, won’t go on to receive and – quite possibly – don’t
deserve to receive a smiley in reply to your greeting. To this, I can only ask,
why the hell did you open with a smiley in the first place? Talk about just asking
to be slapped.